And If We (Ever) Achieved Our Goal? The Challenges of Winding Down a Social Partnership

Cross-sector partnership (CSP) scholars agree on the beneficial role that a clear common goal plays in governing a CSP, such as by helping align diverse partners and mobilize support for social value creation beyond what single organizations or sectors could achieve. While respective insights relate in particular to the early stages of the partnership life cycle, the common goal also implies that, once achieved, the partnership can wind down or repurpose. We however know little about the implications for CSP management and social value creation as the partners approach goal achievement. To forge a more comprehensive understanding of governance via goals in CSPs, I inductively analyze a disease-elimination CSP that, after more than 30 years of operations, was close to achieving its goal and prepared for winding down. Based on a rich set of interview, document, and video material, I illustrate how context-driven complexification of the CSP goal increasingly diluted its initial governance benefits and ultimately challenged the pacing and aspired disembedding of the CSP's winding down processes. By delineating the mechanisms and implications of such goal complexification, the study insights bring to fore the limitations of conceptualizing CSPs as goal-centric, temporary structures and expose the fragility of the social value created.